“This is my food,” says Dorie Greenspan of her latest cookbook, Everyday Dorie (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). The James Beard Award-winning author describes the collection of enticing and often unexpected recipes as her “pantry and fridge book.” The casual food she’s accustomed to making for her family and friends, and a true reflection of her cooking repertoire.

Renowned for her impeccable and approachable baking books – and past collaborations with Julia Child and French pastry chef Pierre Hermé – Everyday Dorie is Greenspan’s second “cookbook cookbook.” The first, Around My French Table (2010), was in homage to simple, delicious, “elbows-on-the-table” Parisian home cooking.

“This is my food,” says Dorie Greenspan of her latest book, Everyday Dorie. “This is really what I cook all the time â how I cook.”Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

While she created each of her 13 cookbooks with the home cook (or baker) in mind, Everyday Dorie is especially practical. “I realized that there was a good reason for that. It wasn’t that my cooking had changed; it wasn’t that my style had changed. But I worked on and cooked most of these recipes while living in Connecticut,” says Greenspan.

Through dishes like her Lower East Side brunch tart – inspired by bagels and lox with “the works” at NYC institution Russ & Daughters – to honey-mustard rillettes and her newest gougères (cheese puffs), the book shows traces of Greenspan’s homes in NYC, Westbrook, Conn. and Paris. But it also reflects the fact that she wasn’t a mere block away from the nearest specialty shop or farmers’ market but an hour round-trip from a supermarket.

“I’ve always loved to play around with recipes to give home cooks and home bakers the chance to take a recipe and run with it, and tweak it so that it’s what they want it to be. But I realized that I was creating recipes that way because if I didn’t have an ingredient, I had to find something else to give me the flavour I wanted,” she says.

“I’m not a fancy cook. I’m not even a fancy baker; I don’t decorate things. If I find a new ingredient, I love to play with it but at heart I’m pretty down-to-earth. But I think that I’m even more basic and more practical here.”

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